The BTI360 Software Internship Experience – 2019 Recap

Getting Started

On a Monday morning in late May, students from UVA and Virginia Tech sat in BTI360’s “Barn” (main conference room), looking forward to the first day of the rest of the summer. It was 8:00 AM and we were all a little sleepy, a little intimidated, and very excited. For a lot of us this was our first internship and an opportunity to get a taste of our future careers. The beginning of any new experience can be a little strange and disorienting for anyone, but BTI made it easy to get comfortable and helped us quickly get familiar with the company and its culture. On the first day, MJ, the CEO, introduced us to the company’s core behaviors — grow each day, lead with humility, and do the right thing. He emphasized that these values are lived out by employees (better known as “teammates”) at BTI360. These values are the cornerstone of the company’s culture, and we’ve seen these behaviors firsthand throughout our interactions with teammates this summer.

Learning

In our first two weeks, the goal was to learn as much as we could. Teammates taught workshops about technologies we would be using during the summer, like Docker, Spring, and Angular. Most of what we learned was completely new to us — we’d never learned any of this our classes! It was a lot of new information to take in, but the hands-on aspects of the workshops solidified our understanding of the concepts and technologies.

Building Scoopt

After we completed the workshops, we immediately began work on our summer project, a news-analysis web application built using the technologies that we studied in the workshops. We named it Scoopt. We learned a lot while we worked; developers from the company reviewed our code for best practices every step of the way and supported us through challenges. At the end of the summer, we presented our experiences to the company and demoed all of our hard work.

Mentors

As part of the company’s passion to help us grow each day, we were each paired with two or three mentors, who we got to meet with every week to talk about work and life. They were also a great resource to learn about what working at BTI360 full-time is like.

Goofing Off Team Building

There was also a lot of time for us to have fun throughout the summer. We broke up our workday with daily ping pong matches and started rock climbing after work as a group. The company also organized team-building events like escape rooms, game nights, and a trip to Kings Dominion. We even had a company picnic where about a third of the company showed up to hang out despite the pouring rain (we were under tents!). All these events helped us really feel at home with the company and showed the family atmosphere of BTI360.

Reflecting

Now, in August, we get to look back and reflect. Coming into the summer, we all felt slightly intimidated and underqualified. Now, thanks to the help of our teammates we’ve learned a lot and became more confident in our skills. We’ve grown as developers and as people, and really feel at home at BTI360. We’re ready to come back next year and jump into our next big project!

Ready to Accelerate your Career?

Are you a junior status college student ready to accelerate your career? We begin accepting applications for our industry-leading internship program in September! You will leave the program ready to commit on day one on your first software project. We will train you in the latest technologies as well as teach you how to be a part of a high performing software team through a blend of training geared towards leadership, mentorship, and practical application. You’ll be a part of high-performance software team developing a real-world application.